The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Steve was very interested in the story of Ursula’s religious afterlife. He quoted from Gerard Manley Hopkins. I have desired to go/ Where springs not fail . . . It is a short poem, and he knew it by heart. Steve had found no such refuge, no heaven haven, and neither had the poor tormented Hopkins of the Terrible Sonnets.

  There had been an ancient spring of fresh water at Troutwell Farm, and in the grounds of the asylum there was an old pump with a stone trough, long since disused, but never dismantled. The old spring was dry. La Source tarie. The 1910 Grade II-listed water tower surveyed the grounds like a watch tower in a war, in a war of mental strife.

  But some, even in its bad years, had found Troutwell a haven.

  Ursula hadn’t seemed to be at all religiously inclined at Halliday, Raoul and Steve agreed. Steve was distressed by Raoul’s account of Ursula’s wanderings and of her alleged return to their alma mater. Raoul gave less detail than he had given to Jess, but it was enough to cause distress. Steve leant forward, earnestly, attentively, solemnly, his large face soft and heavy with a weight of transferred sorrow. Poor woman, he repeated gravely, poor Ursula, poor woman. His voice was as full and gentle as ever, as receptive of grief. Jess remembered him reading the Wordsworth ballads aloud, sonorously, monotonously, all those years ago.

  He is a kind man, Steve, she thinks. The pain of others compounds his own, extends his own, offers him some companionship.

  Steve was also, of course, interested in Raoul’s speciality of phantom pain, and a career which he immediately recognised as a natural consequence of his apprenticeship under the care of Dr Nicholls. Steve wasn’t very well informed about mirror neurones and tended towards a metaphysical interpretation of the human condition, but he honoured Raoul’s sustained devotion to physical explanations and explorations of mental states as well as pseudo-physical sensations. Voices, visions, apparitions.

  Jess wondered whether Ursula in her crazy old age was receiving any kind of medical attention, or whether she had dropped off the map of the social services. There were specialist nurses for the homeless, her Essex friend Lauren had told her, and indeed Jess had tried to contact them, but had drawn a blank. Maybe Ursula had carefully put herself beyond their reach.

  Dr Nicholls had been anti-medication. He took what we now call recreational drugs, but he was anti-medication, a not wholly consistent position, Jess had thought. Liberty Hall, that’s what Susie had called Halliday Hall. But Susie’s boy Vincent had improved beyond all recognition when the right medication had been prescribed for him, and he was now leading a ‘normal’ life.

  Susie and Jess exchange Christmas cards, and keep one another updated on their Marsh Court children.

  Anna does not suffer acute mental anguish, as Steve and Raoul and Ursula have so unjustly and unreasonably suffered it. As Hopkins suffered it. But Anna feels, perhaps excessively, for the pain of others. For Polly and Sukie and their unsuccessful tea party. For Joshua Raven in jail and the tears wept by his mother, Sylvie. For Harry Grigson in the lion’s den. For Maya at the day centre whose dog had been run over by a bus. Anna had not liked the dog, she had been frightened of it, but she was sorry for Maya.

  An allocentric, not an egocentric, personality, that was Anna. Jess had come across that distinction in an article recently. It had seemed to fit Anna. The article had something to do with evolution, but Jess can’t remember what. Raoul seems to believe something not wholly materialistic about evolution, something about the free flow of empathetic neurones linking all human consciousness, all human development. Yet he denies the existence of the non-material world.

  Jess rang me that evening to report on the success of her tea party. She described Steve’s reciting of the two stanzas of ‘A Nun Takes the Veil’. Too much of sharp and sided hail had Steve endured, and so it would seem had Ursula.

  ‘But,’ said Jess as an afterthought, ‘I really, really didn’t want to be out of the swing of the sea. I wanted to be out there, in the waves. That’s what I thought I wanted, when I was young. But here I am, becalmed in Kinderley Road.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with Kinderley Road,’ I said, from the nearby safety of Shawcross Street. And we both laughed.

  Our outing to Troutwell was like a down-market reprise of our outing to Wibletts, though we didn’t take Sylvie. Sylvie was too busy being a baroness, and there was a new bill going through the House that was eating up a good deal of her time. She was much absorbed by its many clauses and amendments. She invited Jess and me to go to watch some of it from the Visitors’ Gallery, as we’d both taken an interest in it and signed a lot of probably pointless online petitions, but I think we were both overcome by a sense of our own impotence and declined. (Also, the Visitors’ Gallery, which I had visited once or twice before, gives me vertigo. It makes me feel as though I am about to hurl myself down into the Chamber. It makes my exposed knees tremble.)

  Jess was very worried about the threat to Anna’s support structure and in particular to the funding of the day centre. They wouldn’t close it, but they would cut its hours, she guessed.

  So off we went, Raoul, Jess and I, in my still new car, in search of Ursula, in search of the potent past.

  We didn’t take Anna.

  We had an appointment with Lauren in a new social services building in the business park that had sprung up and engulfed Troutwell. Lauren might or might not have some clues for us. I was aware by now that Ursula was something of a red herring, that this expedition had some other meaning for Raoul, and that Jess was anxious it should go well for him. Jess chatted along as we went round the M25 towards Essex, telling us we would like Lauren, she was a large, lively and amusing young woman with a colourful dress sense and Essex was lucky to have her, but as she chatted I think we both began to be aware that Raoul was very tense. He was sitting in the back, but I could see in the mirror that he was looking anxious and worried, I began to wonder if he was car sick, my car is very comfortable and not known for causing sickness, but he did look uneasy, and I wondered whether I should propose a coffee break, but that’s not easy on the M25. He did at one point say that he’d never been driven along this stretch of motorway, and it is peculiarly bleak and remorseless as it makes its way past exits to Enfield and Potters Bar and Waltham Abbey; wide lanes, grey-white-hard stretches of lanes, brutal surfaces, heavy lorries on their way to Felixstowe, bloody fools driving too fast on your bumper, gigantic guillotines with warnings about accidents and roadworks hanging over your head, but I knew the A12 was just as bad, a horrible unevenly surfaced road out towards Chelmsford and Colchester and drearily beyond, one of the least loved roads in England.

  It was one of those grey monochrome February days when the roads and the skies flatten and join and spread to a discouraging infinity A wide, scoured, abraded, gritted roadway, very different from the deep rich English leafy sunken roads of Suffolk. I remembered the torrential summer rain, the exuberant flowerbeds, the tall poppies and the tall delphiniums of Wibletts, the expense.

  I thought there was a Little Chef coming up soon, and planned to take a break, but before I suggested it Raoul with some embarrassment leant forward and said, ‘Eleanor, do you mind if we stop soon, I need the bathroom.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘of course’, sorry I hadn’t been able to pre-empt this declaration, and I pulled in at the first Little Chef we came across and we ordered coffee while he disappeared to the gents’. While he was gone Jess said, ‘It’s nerves, he’s worried about seeing the old place again’—and she was right, for when he came back he said so. He had recovered his composure but warned us it might happen again. ‘When I get anxious . . . ’ he said. He didn’t need to finish the sentence, we understood all too well.

  For him, it was like revisiting an old school, an old prison, after many years. Apart from the Ursula problem, which also loomed.

  Raoul said he’d never seen anywhere quite like the Little Chef. Jess and I were well used to them (I, as a committed driver, more accustomed to them than Jess), and we were familiar with
their strange mixture of uniformity and individual local eccentricity, but Raoul was more accustomed to the North American chains. The Little Chef is deeply English, a weird offshoot of the old roadhouse and the old tea room, with its bacon and eggs, its scampi and chips and peas, its buttered scones. It’s Americanised, in its way, but it’s still recognisably English. Old ways linger.

  Finding Lauren and Satis House in the business park was hell. I don’t have a satnav, but I did have maps and two willing and intelligent map readers, and we still couldn’t find it. Jess had warned me about the geography of those parts, but I hadn’t quite believed her. I might have got irritated with this wild-goose chase had I not been worried about further worrying Raoul, for there was something about the post-urban landscape that was profoundly depressing—it was a self-repeating maze of leisure centres and municipal offices and car showrooms and windowless storerooms and hospitals, in a nightmare of jaunty red and steel and glass, and not a tree or a blade of grass to be seen. Eventually, as we circled, Raoul spotted the name of the road we were looking for, Mayhew Circus, and there at last was a modest yellow brick office block called Satis House.

  Plump Lauren was a relief. She was one of those large young women whose fine complexion glows with health, and she was all smiles and laughter and welcome. She wore blue tracksuit bottoms and stylish silver trainers and a gay pink-and-white-striped jumper and pearl earrings. How she kept her spirits up was a wonder, as her job entailed grim matter.

  She hadn’t drawn a total blank with Elizabeth Ursula Strawson: she’d found a bit of a paper trail, though not Ursula herself, and she thanked Raoul for bringing her back to official attention. The community mental health team had received a report two summers ago of an elderly woman answering to his description who was sleeping rough, and it had kept an eye on her for a while, but she had disappeared in the autumn, presumably having found some kind of accommodation or left the neighbourhood. She had never applied to the local-authority housing department, or registered herself as homeless, though she might well have qualified for accommodation as a vulnerable person in priority need, so the matter had rested there. She might still be living in the area, and nobody of her name had died in the area, for Lauren had checked. She might be drawing benefits locally, but Lauren hadn’t tracked down a likely claimant.

  ‘As you know,’ said Lauren robustly, ‘in this country we have the right to be as mad as we like, provided we aren’t a risk to ourselves or others.’

  Raoul took this point, and assured Lauren that he wasn’t interfering. He was just responding to all those letters. He offered to show them to Lauren and got a packet of them out of his bag, but Lauren shook her head: she’d seen enough crazy letters. She suggested we all go and have an early lunch instead, so we’d have time to look at Troutwell before it got dark.

  Over our cheese-and-ham toasties in the newbuild fakewood royal-purple psychedelic pseudo-pub at the end of the Circus, Lauren told us about cuts in the social services and updated herself on Anna’s local-authority funding. (Anna’s old social worker Karen was long retired, and had been succeeded by an over-anxious anorexic young woman called Carol, who, according to Jess, was too fond of trying to teach grandmothers to suck eggs.) Then Lauren told us all she knew about the status of the buildings at Troutwell. The stories about old Troutwell died hard. Even the old-fashioned pre-Dr Nicholls pre-Halliday Troutwell was well remembered: it had been one of the biggest employers in that part of the county, and she knew lots of people whose parents had worked there, whose grandparents had been inmates there, and some of them had happy memories of it. It wasn’t the prison it was painted as being. ‘It was like a world of its own, it was a community,’ said young 48-year-old Lauren. ‘There was something to be said for places like that, and now they don’t know what to do with the buildings—the site was bought up by something called Pipex Properties, but they can’t afford to develop it, it just stands there. I think the library is still in there,’ said Lauren, as she passed us the dessert menu; ‘there was said to have been some interesting stuff in there. Some valuable books and records.

  ‘And there have been squatters, of course there have.

  ‘Halliday Hall was still in use a few years ago, as a day clinic, but even that was boarded up now. Halliday had a good reputation,’ Lauren said.

  It seemed to us that Lauren had a happy temperament, a sweetness and resilience of spirit that overrode the daily grind. She was one of those lucky people, a pure gold person, with her shining clear skin and her bright brown eyes and her ready laugh and her goodwill. Her black hair was cut in a dashingly short prickly style that cheered one to look at it. Her hands and feet and wrists and ankles were small, her body ample. She was a redistributive person, happy to share the good fortune of her nature with those less fortunate.

  I liked her. I asked if she would come with us for the last stage of our journey, but she said she had to get back to work.

  We hadn’t really counted on seeing Ursula. I certainly hadn’t. The outing hadn’t been a quest for Ursula; it had been a pilgrimage for Raoul, who had apologetically been twice to the gents’ in the Purple Boar. It’s not romantic, having to visit the gents’ so often. Jess and I were too old to mind, but I could tell he was embarrassed. He is a very polite man.

  Lauren had told us that if we went to the East Gate, nobody would stop us going in. Most of the perimeter was electrified, but the contractors had given up with the wiring by the time they got to the East Gate, and there was still pedestrian access to the halted works. We’d see a row of conifers, and a reddish-coloured path, and if we followed that we’d reach the main buildings.

  We parked discreetly, not too near the gate. The path was strewn with pine cones. I picked one up and put it in my jacket pocket. It smelled of resin. I’ve still got it. It’s in the car, the now not quite so new but still much loved car, sitting by the digital clock, waiting for time, our time, to end.

  As we walked along the red path, we saw Ursula walking towards us. Maybe on one level we had known that we would.

  Of course I had never set eyes on her in my life before, but there was no mistaking her. Who else could this person be? There was an inevitability about her apparition. She was walking towards us in a slow, stately and, I have to say, nun-like way, head bowed, contemplative, yet as though aware of our approach. She was wearing a long grey skirt and layers of dark coloured knitwear and jackets, and her abundant, long, steel-grey hair was held to her head and away from her face by a pale and childish Alice band. Maybe some bush telegraph had alerted her to our arrival, for she appeared to be expecting our little delegation.

  We converged, I hanging back, for I was only the chauffeur.

  Jess later said that she would have known her anywhere, as she had not changed at all. This, as she knew, was an extravagant exaggeration, yet Jess had indeed instantly recognised Ursula’s proud yet self-abasing bearing, the elevated way she held her neck and head, the theatrical pacing of her steps, the strange and deliberate drama of her presence and selfpresentation. She was distinctive. She was a woman who had missed her vocation, whatever it might have been, yet she walked proudly in those grounds where so many inmates over the years had suffered such a loss of self. She appeared now as the custodian of Troutwell, not as a squatter; nor indeed, it emerged, was she squatting there, although she haunted it. She had found herself a home with an easily manipulated and even more deeply vulnerable householder in the neighbouring council estate who had unwisely let her over her threshold, out of Christian charity. Ursula had settled in with Kathleen and Kathleen’s large threelegged dog in a flat on the Saint Osyth Estate. From this base she had posted her missives to Raoul, and there she had awaited his advent.

  Jess saw that she had been wrong to think that Ursula had retreated to a little, little space. She was in command of these vast deserted grounds. She was their self-appointed warden.

  She greeted us demurely, conventionally, shaking hands with me and Jess, and offering herself to
a tentative hug from Raoul. There was no sign from her of any particularly forceful attachment to Raoul, but there was a sense of a proprietary claim on him, an assumed familiarity. Then we turned, and wandered back towards the old derelict buildings, accompanied by a commentary from Ursula on what had been happening with planning permission, contractors, demolition. Nothing much was happening now. The credit crunch had frozen everything.

  Jess’s mind went back to the first tea party, when she had been so relieved to find Steve so much recovered, when she had first met Zain and brushed against Ursula. She remembered coming back here years later with Anna, with their picnic of tuna sandwiches and cherries, and finding the old fruit trees of the neglected orchard, and the unplumbed lavatory bowls standing in the courtyard. And here she is again, with Ursula and Raoul, the old inmates. It had been summer on her earlier visits, but now it is cold and wan and grey, and there is no light in the air. The light has been sucked out of the sky. Winter is ending, but there is no breath of spring. We have all aged.

  The unplumbed sanitaryware is still there in the courtyard. Time has stood still. We gaze at it, perplexed.

  Jess mentions the library of which Lauren had spoken, and Ursula leads them along a corridor, where shabby brown leafless weed stalks and seed heads push through the cracked tiles, and brambles and ivy prise their way through broken windows. Jess had seen this corridor in vandal images on the internet, though when she came with Anna she had not dared to penetrate so far. The library door hangs loosely open on its hinges, and there are some shelves and the charred ruins of desks. A lot of it’s been burnt, said Ursula. For firewood, said Ursula, last winter, in that cold snap.